Last week in a Times of Israel Blog, Rabbi Brian Strauss of Houston, Texas accused J Street (a pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy political organization in Washington, D.C.) of being anti-Israel based on a selective misreading of J Street statements and actions. Here is his piece – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/j-street-is-honest-about-what-it-is-we-just-have-to-listen/

J Street’s President and CEO, Jeremy Ben Ami, responded, also in a Times of Israel Blog, and clarified J Street’s policy positions which, according to polls, represent the views of 70% of the American Jewish community vis a vis its support of Israel, its security (e.g. support for the Memo of Understanding granting $3.8 billion military support annually for ten years, support of the Iron Dome defense system, support for the JCPOA, and against BDS), prospects for peace and justice with the Palestinians (opposes Israel’s Occupation policies and the expanding settlement enterprise), and supports democracy in Israel and the United States. Here is his piece – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/j-street-and-what-it-really-means-to-be-pro-israel/

I urge those who are concerned about the historically close and important American-Israel relationship and what J Street actually advocates to read both articles carefully. Also, I suggest that they look at J Street’s website (www.jstreet.org) and read its policy positions, blogs, and press releases, and then come to an informed conclusion about J Street’s positions and advocacy work. They may disagree with positions J Street has taken, but it is important that civility amongst American Jews and a respect for each other’s pro-Israel bona fides be sustained and that name-calling and the questioning of motives vis a vis Israel be rejected.

A disclaimer: I have been a supporter of J Street from its beginnings in 2009. I believe in its mission and advocacy goals before the American Congress and Administration as well as its role as a safe space for pro-Israel liberal and progressive American Jews to express their liberal American Jewish values. I serve currently as a national co-chair (with three colleagues in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Tel Aviv) of the J Street Rabbinic and Cantorial Cabinet that has grown to 1100 members nationally.

I start each day very early in the morning – usually between 3:30 am and 4:30 am. As I age, my sleep patterns and circadian rhythms have changed. However, the morning hours are my delight. While it is still dark, I read and write, as my head is clearest then. By the time I perceive through my home office-window looking towards the east the silhouette of the trees emerging from the darkness against a lightening sky, I prepare to go out, rain or shine, for a 3 to 5 mile walk in my neighborhood.

We live in the foothills of Sherman Oaks, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, on a small street without sidewalks that feels more like a country road than a city street. We love it here. We bought this modest home at the beginning of 1989, raised our sons here, and can’t imagine living anywhere else.

While on these morning walks, often while it is still dark, I listen to podcasts or music or I simply enjoy the silence. Ours is a very quiet neighborhood. We can hear sometimes in the distance the Amtrak trains signaling their coming into a station, church bells ringing on the hour, the muffled din of traffic on the 101 a mile or two away, mockingbirds singing mating calls in springtime in our backyard trees, owls cooing, and the loud caws of crows. A flock of crows (called a “murder”) lives here year-round and, apparently, loves our neighborhood as we do. At the top of a tall pine tree two doors from our home, during the spring and summer, there sits often a hawk disturbed from time to time during the nesting season by small black birds swinging around him and squawking as they nose-dive towards the hawk on his perch without there seemingly being any effect at all upon the larger bird that sits so regally and still.

I pass the same people and their dogs most mornings, and though I know no one’s name, we wave to each other in friendly recognition. They are all part of the beginning of my day.

I often witness on these hour+ long walks spectacular moon and sun risings. The colors in the early morning sky of bright red, magenta, and orange play themselves off streaking clouds over rain-soaked streets (of late) yet to evaporate with the progression of the day.

When I see a breath-taking image, I take a photograph. Today, I offer some of those images from the last year that I was fortunate to record at the right moment, as many of them vanished within seconds of their appearance. They represent the quiet radiance and calm of the morning’s light.

A joyful, healthy, and peaceful New Year to you all.

It is hard to fathom the inner life of George Santos, the disgraced Congressman-elect from the 3^rd District of New York, as he manufactured virtually everything about his past and identity to create a new persona and win a seat in Congress – his family origins in Europe and the Holocaust, his religion as a Jew, his high school and college education as a graduate of elite schools, his employment history in powerful economic institutions, his considerable wealth and ownership of multiple properties, his mother’s death in 9/11, and his sexual identity.

So many questions have been raised about the character and integrity of this young man; how he thought he could lie so brazenly and present himself so fraudulently to the constituents of his congressional district; why the media and his Democratic opponent didn’t perform due diligence by giving even a cursory check into Santos’ exalted claims about himself and his alleged accomplishments during the campaign; and how the morally challenged leadership of the Republican Party can remain so utterly silent that such a liar is about to become a fellow Member of Congress, though nothing ought to surprise us any longer about the craven power-seeking-at-all-costs-Republican-Party and its Senate and House members in the Trump era.

I have been wondering how Santos could look at himself in the mirror each morning and then go out into the public and brazenly present himself as a fraud about virtually everything that distinguishes a human being. And I have wondered what damning secrets he is covering up that compelled him to lie so flagrantly and with such hubris and dishonorable ignobility.

What is he hiding? What truths about his character has he veiled? What blemishes is he refusing to confess? What failings has he suffered in his short life about which he seems so embarrassed and shame-filled that he felt the need to create an entirely new identity?

The French novelist and politician André Malraux wrote: “Man is not what he thinks he is; he is what he hides.” (From his novel Man’s Fate, publ. 1933)

True enough. We all hide some things about which we feel are too personal to share with others. Some of us hold tightly onto our secrets from fear of embarrassment and shame. Doing so, though understandable, carries the risk of damage to our moral integrity, emotional well-being, and relationships with others.

Some secrets are like cancer metastasizing in the soul. They ought to be shared confidentially, at the very least, with one’s closest family or friends or therapist or clergy person who can support and help us confidentially move through the suffering that gave rise to our most self-destructive secrets. Only by acknowledging and talking through the most painful truths in our past can we understand ourselves in the present and release the negative toxins associated with the secret we held onto for so long. Denial, deception, and delusion are hindrances to the nurturing of integrated lives and honest relationships. Self-knowledge and self-acceptance of our vulnerabilities are foundational to self-understanding, emotionally sound and spiritually healthy human beings.

It is unclear whether Mr. Santos understands himself at all. His lies are so egregious that we have to wonder – who is this young man beneath his here-to-fore fraudulent veneer?

We certainly cannot know what secrets he holds that motivated him to falsify everything in his life. Perhaps, he hoped that the pursuit of public office offered him an escape from his secrets and an opportunity to invent himself ex nihilo.

Over time, of course, the character of most public people emerges under the flood lights of celebrity. Though Santos’ deception came too late to throw the election to his opponent (thanks to The New York Times), Shakespeare’s counsel rings true and is sound advice for us all whether we are public figures or live the most private of lives: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” (Hamlet – Act 1, Scene 3)

My wife and I had been holding onto boxes of memorabilia in our garage that belonged to our sons Daniel and David since they left for college nearly 20 and 15 years ago so that one day, when they had homes of their own, they could retrieve the boxes. They collected them last month. As they cleared out an area of the garage, I found one box stacked beneath theirs containing very old and heavy books that I saved when my brother and I moved our mother from her apartment into assisted living years ago but about which I had forgotten were there.

These books once belonged to my father. His parents, immigrants from Ukraine to the United States in the early 1890s, must have purchased these volumes new in 1900 when they were first published. My father was born exactly 117 years ago today, on December 30, 1905. His upcoming birthday reminded me yesterday that these old books were sitting in our garage. And so I decided to open the box to see what was inside.

The box contained 10 volumes entitled “Messages and Papers of the Presidents – 1789-1897,” copyrighted in 1897 and printed by permission of the Congress of the United States (1900). Each volume contains proclamations, letters, speeches, memos, photographs, political cartoons, and reproductions of paintings of all the first American presidents from George Washington to Grover Cleveland.  

Yesterday, I took the ten volumes into the house to preserve them against the cold and heat of our garage, and I looked especially through the papers of Abraham Lincoln, printed only 32 years after his assassination. The volume contains many photographs of him, his wife and sons, his contemporaries and friends, his birthplace and home in Springfield, Illinois, as well as a photo of the house in which he died across from the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. Each volume has similar documents of all the nation’s first 24 presidents.   

These are veritable treasure troves of first documents of American history.

As it happens, I have almost completed reading Jon Meacham’s new biography of Lincoln called “And There Was Light – Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle” (New York: Random House, 2022). I recommend it highly, especially to history buffs.

Jon Meacham is a national treasure in his own right, a prolific historian and commentator on contemporary political affairs. I have read many excellent histories of Lincoln, and Meacham’s is a worthy addition to all those that came before. His book reads like a contemporary narrative with emphasis on Lincoln’s boyhood, self-education, early family and love life, and his legal and political life leading through his single term in Congress, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, his election as President, the Civil War, and his principled decision to emancipate enslaved African Americans. The text includes conversations with his long-time friends, family, cabinet, and generals. Meacham is true as well to Lincoln’s periodic melancholy leading him at several points in his life to contemplate suicide following the deaths of an early love and of his son Willie.

As I read the remarkable story of our nation’s 16^th President, I was struck by Lincoln’s courage and resolve in carrying the union of the country on his back, and his dogged devotion to moral principle in waging war against the rebellious south leading to the elimination of the “peculiar institution” of the enslavement of an entire race of human beings. 

Meacham’s writing is crisp and insightful. Here is but one example in which he describes Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

“The Gettysburg Address was an eloquent attempt to frame American politics as not only a mediation of interests but as a moral undertaking. Slave owners portrayed slavery as divinely ordained; Lincoln portrayed individual liberty as God-given. Slave owners invoked the constitution as a shield for suppression; Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence as a higher, older, superseding authority. Slave owners defended an aristocracy of color; Lincoln defending democracy.”

The confluence of my reading Meacham’s biography and my rediscovering the 10 volumes of presidential papers that I recall  from my childhood sitting on my birth home’s living-room shelf, not only is a source of inspiration about one of the greatest figures in American and world history, but a source of loving memory on my father’s birthday 117 years ago. Zichrono livracha.

Haaretz Opinion – Uzi Baram – Dec 28, 2022

Introductory Note: Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Physics concerns “Action & Reaction.” It states that “for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.” So too in politics. This is what so many non-ultra-Orthodox and non-right-wing extremist Israelis and American Jews are hoping will be the case as PM Netanyahu’s most extreme religious and nationalistic government in the history of the State of Israel takes control of the levers of power and inflicts them upon a largely unwilling Israeli population.  

The following is an op-ed that appeared on December 28, 2022 in *Haaretz by columnist Uzi Baram. He urges Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz to come together as partners and organize against the extremist anti-democratic and fascist leanings of the new government, and on behalf of the majority of Israelis who care about the preservation of Israel’s democracy that the new government threatens to undo.

“Those who voted for the bloc for change are stunned. They are no longer examining the benighted agreements one by one, they’re experiencing a kind of shell shock. Like tourists who planned a trip to an enjoyable vacation site, with moderate temperatures and delightful spots, and upon exiting the plane discover that the temperature is 50 degrees centigrade and haze clouds every attraction.

And the shock has yet to dissipate. Every day we hear reports about horrific agreements, accompanied by pathetic denials on the part of Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s easy to fight a government that posits the annexation of the territories as a supreme value. Opponents of annexation identify the source of the salvo and respond with a war on the parliamentary, public and legal fronts. It’s far more difficult to fight against bombardment from all directions. That is the reason for the shock that sometimes leads to a sense of helplessness.

And therefore this hour is especially difficult for democracy and its liberal concept of human rights – because not only is it being savagely attacked, but at the moment it looks as though there is nobody to defend it. The media transmits the government’s messages and there are no signs of a genuine parliamentary and public battle to confront the medieval doctrines that Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avi Maoz and Orit Strook are trying to impose on us.

However, when the shock dissipates, harsh criticism will be directed not only at the components of the government but also against opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz. There are other parties in the opposition, but the “two aces” are the leaders of its largest parties, the National Unity party and Yesh Atid. They have an obligation to answer the question: Where is the opposition? In the cooperation between Ze’ev Elkin from the National Unity camp and Boaz Toporovsky of Yesh Atid? That doesn’t exactly meet the challenges of this period.

Lapid and Gantz must be seen together, preferably falling into each other’s arms and saying articulately and without stuttering: “What was – is in the past. Today we’re together, politically and personally. We have removed all the past residue. We are confronting a thuggish regime change when most of the public is with us. The majority is not interested in annexing the West Bank and imposing sovereignty on the Temple Mount; the majority is not interested in religious or gender discrimination, just as it doesn’t want Maoz to influence its children’s education. Nor does the majority agree to doubling the budgets of the yeshivas and increasing the allowances for married yeshiva students who are robbing the public coffers.

“Some of the citizens in whose name we speak voted Likud, but they don’t support the extremist messianic wave that we have received. Together with them and all the factions in the opposition we will lead a joint struggle, to be conducted in the Knesset and by means of a prolonged and resolute public rebellion. We cannot remain silent when an entire community feels that Yitzhak Goldknopf, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are destroying the landscape of its homeland.”

Such an appearance is necessary and urgent. The coalition in the making must be presented with a united opposition leadership. A clear and honest cooperation between Lapid and Gantz will not cause the downfall of the government, but it will indicate the direction of the struggle and in so doing will foster hope. An opposition will arise with or without them. If considerations of prestige prevent this cooperation, the vacuum will be filled by another movement. In the face of the right’s burning sense of revenge there will be someone who will posit the values of democracy and human rights.”

*Haaretz is a subscription newspaper in Israel and is considered the New York Times of Israel journalism. From time to time I print op-eds from Haaretz such as the above, but also I advocate that serious friends of Israel take out a subscription to the English language on-line site. It is worth the expense – I assure you.

As a progressive Zionist and lover of the people, Land, and State of Israel, I cannot nor will I turn my back on the Jewish State despite the rise of the most extremist ultra-Orthodox and nationalist government in the history of the State that threatens Israeli democracy, human rights, and Israel’s good name.

We Diaspora Jews need Israel as a source of our American Jewish pride for its extraordinary accomplishments to world Jewry and humankind since its founding 75 years ago, as well as the source of our security in Diaspora communities especially in an era in which antisemitism has emerged as a threat to American Jewish well-being and American democracy.

Israel needs us North American Diaspora Jews for our political support in the halls of the American government and for the wisdom we have gained living as a minority in a democracy that respects the constitutional freedoms of religion, speech, and press assured by the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. The vast majority of Israelis who oppose the extremist, racist, homophobic, misogynist, and illiberal policies of the new government need us in America for our emotional and financial support.

As the new government of Israel threatens that nation’s democracy despite what the in-coming PM Netanyahu  promises to disallow related to the traditional role of Israel’s judiciary, the rights of LGBTQ individuals, non-Orthodox Judaism, women’s rights, and Palestinian rights, we American Jews have a difficult decision to make.

As I indicate at the top of this piece, turning away from the greatest accomplishment of the Jewish people in the last 2000 years of Jewish history is not in ours or in Israel’s best interest. Visiting Israel, living in Israel, teaching our young people about Israel and sending them to establish personal relationships with Israelis and to learn about Israeli society, and contributing to organizations that support Israel and our own liberal Jewish values is what we must now do with even greater urgency than we may have done in the past.

We American liberal Jews represent 70% of the American Jewish community. Many others who are more conservative also are alarmed as we are by what Israel’s new government threatens to do against Israeli democracy.

I have my favorite American and Israeli organizations that promote liberal Jewish values, justice, compassion, human rights, and peace in Israel to which I have been contributing for years. They include:

The Association of Reform Zionists of America (ARZA); Kehilat Kodesh v’Chol, my synagogue’s sister synagogue in Holon, Israel; the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism (IMPJ), the umbrella organization for all Reform congregations in the State of Israel; the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), the social justice organization of the IMPJ; the New Israel Fund (NIF), an American organization promoting justice and equality for all Israelis; Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights organization supporting Israel-Palestinian peace in Jerusalem; Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli human rights organization; Project Rozana, an Israeli organization that seeks to build bridges to better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians through health; and J Street, a pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy American political and educational organization based in Washington, D.C.

There are many others that one can support. I urge everyone who cares about Israeli democracy, equal rights in the State of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian peace and justice, and Israel’s well-being and good name to direct your charitable donations going forward away from those American Jewish organizations that make no demands upon Israel to maintain and promote its democracy, and give your tzedakah funds instead to other American and Israeli organizations that promote liberal Jewish and Zionist values upon which the State of Israel was founded and upon which Israel has distinguished itself as a bastion of freedom and democracy in the Middle East.

Note: This same blog under the title “U.S. Jews Cannot Turn Our Backs on Israel” appears at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/us-jews-cannot-turn-our-backs-on-israel/ .

By Ron Kampeas December 22, 2022

(JTA) — More than *430 American rabbis, including some who occupy prominent roles in major cities, are pledging to block members of the Religious Zionist bloc in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government from speaking at their synagogues and will lobby to keep them from speaking in their communities.

An open letter now circulating says they will not invite members of the bloc “to speak at our congregations and organizations. We will speak out against their participation in other fora across our communities. We will encourage the boards of our congregations and organizations to join us in this protest as a demonstration of our commitment to our Jewish and democratic values.”

Netanyahu announced his proposed new government including the Religious Zionists late Wednesday, although its details have yet to be finalized.

Israeli government ministers sometimes speak at American synagogues to drum up support for their initiatives and ideas. It’s not clear if figures who are harshly critical of non-Orthodox Jews, as Religious Zionist leaders have been, would accept invitations from their synagogues even if offered. Nevertheless, the letter’s uncompromising tone and the breadth of the signatories is a signal of a burgeoning crisis in relations between Israel and the U.S. Jewish community triggered by the elevation of the extremists, who won 14 seats in the Nov. 1 election.

Its signatories come from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. There are no Orthodox signatories.

Among the signatories are current and former members of the boards of rabbis in Chicago and Los Angeles; rabbis who lead the largest Conservative and Reform congregations in the Washington, D.C., area; former leaders of major Reform and Conservative movement bodies; the current leader of the Reconstructionist movement; and the rector of the Conservative movement’s Los Angeles-based American Jewish University. The letter was organized by David Teutsch, a leading Reconstructionist rabbi in Philadelphia, and John Rosove, the rabbi emeritus of Temple Israel in Los Angeles.

The letter outlines five Religious Zionist proposals that it says “will cause irreparable harm to the Israel-Jewish Diaspora relationship”: changing the Law of Return to keep out non-Orthodox converts and their descendants; eroding LGBTQ rights; allowing the Knesset to override Supreme Court rulings; annexing the West Bank; and expelling Arab citizens who oppose Israel’s government.

How much of that agenda will make its way into governance remains to be seen. Netanyahu has said he is confident that he will be able to constrain some of the figures he plans to name to lead ministries.

Among these are Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been tapped to control the police and who has been convicted of incitement over his past support of Israeli terrorist groups and inflammatory comments about Israel’s Arab population; Bezalel Smotrich, who has been accused by Israeli security forces in the past of plotting violent attacks against Palestinians, and who will supervise West Bank Jewish settlements; and Avi Maoz, who has described himself as a “proud homophobe” and has called all liberal forms of Judaism a “darkness,” and who will have authority over some aspects of education.

A number of U.S. Jewish groups spoke out against including the extremist faction in the government while Netanyahu was negotiating with the bloc, and more have done so since he announced the government’s formation on Wednesday. They include the Anti-Defamation League, the major non-Orthodox movements, and the liberal Jewish Middle East policy groups Partners for Progressive Israel, J Street and Americans for Peace Now.

Abe Foxman, the retired director of the ADL and a longtime bellwether of establishment Jewish support for Israel, said earlier this month that he is hopeful that Netanyahu can contain the extremists, but that “if Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”

Some organizations that spoke out in 2019 when Netanyahu considered a coalition with extremists were silent even as others sounded the alarm since the election, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. An AIPAC statement after Netanyahu’s announcement this week said, “Once again, the Jewish state has demonstrated that it is a robust democracy with the freedoms that Americans also cherish,” The Conference of Presidents has not issued a statement.

Orthodox groups have yet to pronounce on the new government. The Zionist Organization of America, which backs settlement building, has indicated it will support the new government.

The American Jewish Committee shifted its tone slightly from before the election, when it declined to speak out. In a statement after Netanyahu’s announcement, it sounded a note similar to Foxman’s, saying it would work with Netanyahu “to help ensure that the inflammatory rhetoric that has been employed by some members of the governing coalition — rhetoric unrepresentative of Israel’s democratic values, its role as a homeland for all Jews, and its unwavering quest for peace — will not define the domestic and foreign policies of the new government.”

The Biden administration has said that it will judge Israel’s government by its policies, not the individuals in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

*The number of rabbis that signed this letter since this news item from JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) was first published is more than 430 (as of January 5, 2023) and climbing. This news item was reported in The Washington Post, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The New York Jewish Week, The Daily Forward, The Algameiner, The Cleveland Jewish News, The Northern California Jewish Press, The Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Religion News Service, The New Arab, WAFA Agency (the Palestine News Service), Middle East Eye, and i24 News. It was discussed on the Podcast “For Heaven’s Sake” with Rabbi Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi.

At the recent J Street National Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., our President and CEO Jeremy Ben Ami addressed the conference and said, among other things:

“… regarding the relationship of Jewish America to an Israel mired in permanent occupation and increasingly undemocratic, J Street will be a home for those who believe that our community – for itself more than even for Israel – must root its identity not in commitment to a flag or a piece of land, but to a set of principles and values. If we do not, we will see large swathes of our community walk away not only from engagement with Israel – which is already happening – but from the Jewish community itself.” (For his complete remarks, see https://jstreet.org/an-indispensable-force-j-street-in-the-2020s/):

Jeremy expressed the shared worry of so many of us that the policies of the incoming and  most extreme right-wing religious and nationalist government in Israel’s history will cause a rupture in the relationship of a large part of American liberal Jews with Israel.

In light of this threat I want to clarify what I believe are the deepest commitments of progressive Zionism of which J Street is a prominent part. It may seem to some that J Street’s emphasis on the liberal Jewish values of Tikun Olam (i.e. social justice) is at odds and in tension with the values of Klal-Yisrael tribalism, but I do not believe that is the case nor that these two commitments of the Jewish people conflict based upon the historic emphasis of Zionism relative to the ethical principles of equality, justice, compassion, and peace towards all peoples.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in New York recently explained well the relationship between Judaism’s universal humanitarian values and Jewish tribal values on his Podcast “In These Times”:

“At no time in Jewish history was Tikun Olam, the universal demand to do what is just and right, ever ripped from the moorings of Klal Yisrael, the centrality of Jewish peoplehood. It was never one or another. Loyalty to the Jewish people absent concern for all the families of the earth is a distortion of Judaism. Tikun Olam, the repair of the world, divorced from Jewish peoplehood is not Jewish universalism, it’s just universalism.”

Though these two themes in Jewish history today feel strained in light of the extreme ultra-nationalist exclusionary politics of Israel’s right-wing government to-be, as a Progressive Zionist, I know I share with others in the progressive Zionist movement an unconditional love for Israel, and I reserve the right to be critical of policies that are contrary to the liberal American Jewish values upon which I was raised and are the basis of J Street’s political philosophy and principles.

Though we here in the Jewish Diaspora should not tell Israelis what to do, especially on matters of war, security, and peace as Israelis are the ones who must take the decisions they believe necessary and live with the consequences of those decisions. After all, we Diaspora Jews do not vote in Israeli elections, nor do we send our children to the army, nor pay Israeli taxes. Consequently, a certain humility is incumbent upon us. Still, we have the right to share our ideas with the leadership of the State of Israel even as we advocate for those liberal pro-Israel policies in the halls of the American government that we believe in and that we know, according to all polls, are shared by the vast majority of the American Jewish community and by hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Further, we have a right and duty to share our ideas because what Israel does has a direct impact on American Jewish identity, American Jewish pride, and American Jewish security as a minority population in the United States.

The Talmud is clear about the intimate character of our relationship as Jews to each other wherever we live: “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh – All Israel is responsible one for another.” (Sota 37a)

There are many interpretations of Zionism from the far right to the far left that, for better and worse, are part of a large pro-Israel Zionist tent. As the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, Zionism is also a social justice movement. It is both a particular cause and a universal cause. As such, the Jewish people seeks not only our own national liberation, justice, and safety for our own people, but the liberation of and justice and safety for all peoples, including the Palestinians. Zionism’s social justice emphasis is the basis as well for the promotion of a more shared society with equal rights, justice, and privileges for Israeli-Jewish citizens and Israeli-Palestinian Arab citizens alike.

It is false dichotomy to separate Judaism’s universal humanitarian values from Judaism’s tribal values. The former grows from the latter and the latter embraces the former. The ancient prophets of Israel advocated for both just as both are articulated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. To separate them is a false dichotomy and is dangerous to the well-being and integrity of the State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.

Note: J Street is a pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy political organization in Washington, D.C. that advocates for liberal American Jewish values and for Israel’s security and well-being in the nation’s capital.

This blog is posted also at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/tikun-olam-vs-klal-yisrael-tribalism-a-false-dichotomy/

A number of years ago, I was invited to speak to fifteen soon-to-be-ordained rabbinic students at the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. I was joined by two long-time friends and colleagues on a panel and we were asked to share what kept us excited, inspired, passionate, and creative in our work as congregational rabbis.

Someone read this blog from years ago today (as I can see what blogs are read and re-read) and reminded me of it. The question about which I spoke then is still relevant today, and so I updated my response for these times and offer my thoughts again here.

This question is, of course, not only for rabbis. It is for everyone who works hard, takes pride in their work, seeks excellence, wants to make a contribution, and hopes to maintain a healthy balance in their lives. It is a question I have asked myself frequently since I retired in 2019 and throughout this horrid political environment and in the age of Covid that has brought massive death, loss, and long-Covid debilitation for many.

When I first wrote about the question, the Torah portion that week was Parashat Tzav (Leviticus 6:1-8:36). At the beginning of the reading is a relevant verse:

“The burnt offering itself shall remain where it is burned upon the altar all night until morning, while the fire on the altar is kept burning on it.” (6:2)

The English translation that appears in most editions of the Bible, however, is incorrect. Here is the relevant Hebrew of the final phrase of the verse: “V’esh ha-mis’bei-ach tukad bo – The fire of the altar burns in it [It does not read “tukad alav – burns on it”].”

Since the destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple by Rome in 70 C.E. when all sacrifices ceased, many Jewish commentators interpreted the sacrifices (korbanot – the root of the verb means “coming close”) as metaphor. The altar can refer to the human heart, and the fire that burnt in the altar can refer to the fires of excitement and inspiration that burn in the heart.

We were asked – What keeps our inner fires burning in service to the Jewish people?

I was moved by the question and took it to my congregants years ago who studied Torah with me on Friday mornings, and to my family and friends at our Passover Seder that year. I asked the question more broadly: “What sustains you in your life and in your work?”

Here are some of their responses:

• Many of the men who learned Torah with me each week said that engaging with the ancient, medieval, and modern texts grounded them in who they are as Jews, as human and spiritual beings, and as inheritors of 3600 years of Jewish engagement with God, ethics, practice, faith, culture, and history;
• My Seder family and friends said that whenever they read fine literature and poetry and then wrote themselves, or when they listened to and played musical instruments, visited museums and galleries and created art, worked in their gardens and cooked creatively, the embers in their hearts were stoked;
• Two people mentioned that the mastery they attained in their work inspired them to learn more, teach others, publish, and carry on the work;
• A recovering alcoholic said that daily prayer and meditation brought him back to his most natural self;
• Many said that helping others and engaging in social justice work connected them to community and to higher ideals that inspired and sustained them;
• Several said that sitting quietly in a favorite place renewed them;
• Many spoke of the love they feel for their spouses, partners, children, grandchildren, parents, brothers, sisters, extended family, and friends who were the embers that fed their inner flames.

The important question again is this – What feeds your inner flames?

I wish for you all, as we approach the Hanukah season beginning next week, that your inner light will be rekindled from that which burns within from your deepest embers.

A pre-Hag Hanukah sameach.

Among the most inspirational hours I have spent of late was in a meeting I had this week with 20 Israelis visiting Los Angeles who are traveling around America meeting Jews. Part of the “Gesher” program of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs of the Israeli Government, they come from all over Israel, mostly Israeli-born. They are television reporters, correspondents with Haaretz and Israel Hayom newspapers, educators, political leaders, civil servants, military commanders, Ultra-Orthodox Haredim, and secular Israelis. I was invited as a representative of J Street, the largest pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy PAC in Washington, D.C. advocating for diplomacy, democracy, and a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I asked their leader how they all get along with each other – knowing of the enmity that can characterize such a diverse group of Israelis. He said that after every meeting with American Jews from across the spectrum, they talk and listen to each other with respect and attention, and have become friends. “If only American Jewry could do the same,” I said.

The group’s mission  is to create a “bridge” – hence the word “gesher” meaning “bridge” between the two largest Jewish communities in the world – Israel with 6.5 million Jews and the United States with 7.5 million Jews.

In my prepared remarks, I told them who I am as a liberal Reform American rabbi and Zionist, and my family roots in Ukraine and Palestine. I told them about my great-grand uncle Avraham Shapira whose family are among the founders of Petach Tikvah from 1880 (half the group knew of him), and about the situation of the American liberal Jewish community in our relationship with the people and State of Israel. I quoted to them the most recent poll numbers about the 550,000 Los Angeles Jewish community – 48,000 from the Former Soviet Union; 46,000 Israelis; 22,500 Iranians; 32,500 Jews of color; 430,000 Ashkenazim; 77,000 Sephardim; and 22,000 Mizrachim.

LA Jewry includes ultra-Orthodox, modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and “Just Jewish.” We are Westside Jews, Valley Jews, Hollywood Jews, and secular Jews. Politically, 75% vote with the Democratic Party and 25% vote with the Republican Party. 80% feel that Israel is an important part of their Jewish identity, though increasingly growing numbers of young liberal American Jews under the age of 30 feel alienated from Israel because of the right-wing government and the lack of a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I explained that 40% of America’s 7.5 million Jews have been to Israel at least once. 5-10% speaks Hebrew; 50% reads from the Siddur and understands a few Hebrew words; 40% are members of synagogues or other Jewish communal organizations; 75% support a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in principle, but recognize that given the weakness and corruption of the Palestinian leadership and the new right wing government of Israel, 2 states for 2 peoples is not coming any time soon.

I told them about my worries as a liberal American Zionist, that the recent election of the most extreme nationalistic ultra-Orthodox government in Israel’s history is abhorrent to the Israel most American Jews love, to our liberal Judaism and liberal Zionism, that North American Jewry’s relationship to Israel going forward is fraught with tension and risk, that we are holding our breath about what the new government will do concerning Israel’s High Court, the settlement enterprise, settler violence, the rights of the Palestinian Arabs under military occupation, and the violence that is taking the lives of Palestinians daily and Israelis weekly. I told them of our worry about the cohesiveness of Israeli society (their group notwithstanding), Israel’s relationship with world Jewry (their group is one important effort to help bridge the chasm between our communities), and Israel’s standing in the international community.

I spoke for about 15 minutes and then we talked. They asked me the following:

• How do you define Judaism?
• What are your red lines beyond which you believe someone is anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and antisemitic?
• Palestinians have missed so many opportunities to make peace. What do you think is going to happen if there is no one to talk to on the other side?
• Do you and American Jews understand the fear we Israelis feel when missiles are fired at our people and we have to run into bomb shelters?
• You say that only 40% of the American Jewish community has ever been to Israel. Why don’t American Jews want to visit us more?
• Do you feel that American Jews should have an equal say about our policies concerning our security?
• What will you do, Rabbi, if American Jews want to take away support from Israel financially, militarily, and diplomatically if Israel’s government becomes more extreme?
• Do you think that Netanyahu doesn’t like the American Jewish community?

Here are my quick replies (in order of the above):

• I define Judaism as a civilization with all the markings of the great civilizations – history, land, government, law, language(s), faith, ethics, customs, religious practice, life cycle celebrations, holidays, culture, and the arts.
• Someone who does not support the right of the Jewish people to define ourselves and to a state of our own is antisemitic. Though there are Jews who do not believe in a state of Israel, such as the Haredim, and it is hard to call them antisemites. Someone who accepts that right but criticizes policies that they believe are not in Israel’s, America’s, or the American Jewish community’s best interests are not antisemites or anti-Israel.
• Yes, Palestinian leaders could have negotiated a 2-state solution after Oslo on at least 4 occasions with 4 Israeli Prime Ministers (Rabin, Barak, Olmert, and Netanyahu). That said, it is not in Israel’s interest if it seeks to remain both democratic and Jewish if there is no resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So patience is required. Many thousands of Palestinians want peace and a state of their own and accept Israel’s existence. The Palestinians need new leadership just as Israel needs the leadership of someone like Israel’s last Prime Minister Lapid. It is inevitable that a 2 state solution of some kind (Confederation is one viable option) but I may never see it in my life time (I am 73 years old).
• Yes, I know the fear that Israelis feel of Arab terrorism and war. I spent my first year of rabbinic study in Israel during the Yom Kippur War and I have been back 25 times, and so many of those times there was violence in Israel’s streets. In March 2002, I was in Jerusalem and walked by the Moment Café one hour before a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered 75 young Israelis. Bombs were exploding all over Jerusalem that month. It was the only time I was afraid to be in Israel. The second Intifada and the terrorism emanating from the West Bank was the reason PM Sharon ordered the building of the Security Fence. It is a necessary evil because it stopped Palestinian suicide bombers from coming into Israel from the West Bank and killing Jews. One day, in a peace agreement, I hope it will be taken down.
• I believe that many American Jews are afraid to come to Israel (unless they come with their rabbis). They read only the bad news in the headlines and miss the extraordinary society that Israel is, that it is a vital democracy inside the Green Line, that it has more patents per capita than any nation in the world except the United States, that it is a leading nation in hi-tech, bio-technology, cyber, medicine, climate change and ecology, agriculture, the arts and music, and that American Jews need to see it and feel the pride in the miracle that Israel is.
• I explained that only Israelis have the right to take the hard decisions about war and peace and their security. American Jews don’t send their children to the military nor pay taxes. However, we have a right and duty to share our ideas about matters that have an impact on our security as American Jews here, our identity as lovers and supporters of the State of Israel, that 80% of American Jews have said that Israel is important to their Jewish identity, and that we have a right to advocate for our liberal American Jewish Zionist values in the halls of the American government.
• I explained that I fear that Israel’s new extreme right-wing nationalist ultra-Orthodox government will seek to annex the West Bank and foreclose a two-state solution altogether, act to take rights away from non-Orthodox Jews, and create a theocracy. Then I will not know what to do. I’ll still support Israel because Israel represents the hope of the Jewish people and the greatest experiment in Jewish living in the last 2000 years testing our ethical tradition in the context of our having sovereignty and power, and I will fight for justice for the Palestinians even as I advocate for Israel’s security and well-being amongst American Jews and in the halls of American government. I hope that day never comes when extremists in Israel destroy democracy in the State of the Jewish People for Israel’s sake and for ours here in America and around the world.
• Bibi, clearly, does not like the American Liberal Jewish community or the Democratic Party. He prefers to align with 80 million evangelical Christians and the Republican Party. But he is a savvy politician, and he did reserve the right to veto Smotrich and Ben Gvir’s actions in his agreement with their parties should he think those actions will alienate the United States. We will have to wait and see.

There were many more questions we did not have time to discuss. I left feeling exhilarated that Israelis from every demographic group are interested in building bridges with the American Jewish community in all our diversity and talking with us, listening to us, as we listen to them and try and understand their lives and circumstances.

As a parting gift, they gave me a paper cut of Jerusalem with the Hebrew inscription “Kol Yisrael aravim zeh lazah” (All Israel is responsible one for another), and I gave each a copy of my book Why Israel [and its Future] Matters – Letters of a Liberal Rabbi to his Children and the Millennial Generation with an Afterword by my sons, Daniel and David Rosove.

It was an important hour we spent together and I was grateful to meet them all and have the privilege of speaking with them.

This blog was also posted with The Times of Israel –
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-hour-with-a-diverse-group-of-israelis-in-los-angeles/